Newsrooms Fail to Grow with Diversity

Kiley Landusky
kl290311@ohio.edu

As America grows up into a more diverse “melting pot,” the newsrooms cannot seem to keep up.  The industry’s recession has hit minorities harder than the overrepresented whites, pushing them out of the workplaces they diversified. This underrepresentation of minorities in the news industry yields even more underrepresentation in news stories being released.

            An article in the Atlantic tells us of research conducted by The American Society of News Editors. This study shows that in a country with 37% of its population comprised of minorities, only 12.37% represent its newsrooms.

            There is an undeniable need for more minority representation in our newsrooms. Not only do minorities need reporters that reflect their points of view, the rest of the population needs to hear from voices other than the dominant ones.

Who Are We Talking To?

            The majority of listeners/readers/watchers varies by media platform. The Pew Research Center has conducted studies that show which ethnic group leads each category.

            Newspaper readers are primarily white. Television news watchers are primarily African American. Does this matter when we consider the voices contributing to each media platform? I do believe it does.

            I do not think that every platform should be separated by ethnicity. That would be ridiculous. News contributors should at least be equally represented in the newsroom as they are in viewership. In a perfect world, each ethnicity would be equally represented on all platforms, pulling in all audiences and demonstrating the beauty of diversity to each ethnicity.

This image was provided by Reddit. http://www.redditpics.com/the-diversity-of-fox-news-anchors-fixedfixed,2704872/ 

Who is Best at Speaking?

            It seems as though college students are the best at representing minorities when compared to professional journalists. Laura K. Smith writing for The Howard Journal of Communications reveals information gathered in research conducted by Poindexter, Smith and Heider from 2003. Their research showed that diversity played a significant role in the professor’s teaching philosophy and design.

            Not only did the amount of sources per story average out as more in students’ work than professionals, but the diversity of those sources was also greater in students’ work. 27% of the students’ sources were from minorities while only 19% of the professionals’ sources were minorities. Students also were more likely to include diverse voices early on in the stories, and keep them consistent throughout their stories.

            As far as voicing minorities’ concerns, Caucasians were less likely than minorities in the newsroom to seek out and include racial and ethnicity minorities as sources. This tells us that we need a lot more than just the white kids running the show. We may still hear about minorities from white reporters, but the extent of what we hear will probably be less than if a minority was reporting.

What Do We Do?

            As journalists, it is important to widen our coverage to all races and all ethnic backgrounds, specifically those represented in the region we report in. Caucasian reporters should feel urged to get out of their comfort zone and use more minorities as sources in their stories.

            The management of media should also seek minority voices to represent and articulate to the public the issues surrounding various minorities represented in the population. This is crucially important because as our diversity grows in the real world, readers will want to see the same growth in the journalism industry.